Dukkha
by SarahBelle
Summary: In the years after the slaughter of her people, a ghost in the Eastern mountains repeats what she had been taught to ease her soul. A story of short chapters, based largely on Buddhist teachings.
1. Dukkha

**I do not own anything in the world of Avatar. Not even this character.**

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****Dukkha****' is a concept in Buddhism that can generally be translated as 'suffering'****. The idea is that by living in the right manner i.e. the Noble Eightfold Path, the suffering that we are born into - which takes many forms - can be escaped, by simply not allowing it to have any hold upon you. The spiritual Air Benders have always seemed rather like Buddhists to me, and since in 'The Guru' reference was made to 'chakra' points (a Hindu term), I thought it would be ****interesting to**** introduce teachings of another religion into the Avatar world.**

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Sister Iio had taught her of suffering when she was a little girl, just beginning to learn her sutras. She told her of the nature of suffering, of the causes of it – loss or craving chiefly among them – that it could cease and, most importantly, _how _it could cease. How it might be quelled by cleansing of the spirit, by living the right way, by doing the right thing and knowing when to do it. 

Sister Iio said that in the world, in everything, there was suffering; in birth, in age, in sickness and in death, in dissatisfaction, in not getting what you wanted, in getting what you did not want – all that and more, was suffering. Suffering was in the very air around you that you breathed and bended, in the blood in your body, in your mind and in your heart. It was always there.

Curiously, perhaps naively, Sister Iio had spoken _of _suffering and not _about_ it, as if knowing nothing of it but expecting her little pupil to nonetheless. But why should she? _How_ could she? All the nuns of the Eastern Air Temple lived together in peace and happiness, with everything that could be had. She had never known a day when she was hungry, or a time when she was sick. She did not see her mother and father very often, true, but she did not mind so greatly, for she did not lack love from her many sisters and every few months her mother and father would come to visit her and she knew that when she was older they would take her with them on their journeys across the world, so she did not long for it or them desperately. She had everything that she needed, if not everything that she wanted.

How then could she know of suffering? Why should she know of it at all? And why had she been taught how to make it stop?

Malu the Ghost Witch now knew the answers to all of those questions; and she knew also that Sister Iio, naïve as she had been, had also been remarkably foresighted.

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** **Those of you who know your _Avatar _will know that ****Malu**** is not an OC; she is a character from the trading card game. I've always quite liked her, so I started thinking about how to expand upon her story. I mean, how ****would you** **stop yourself going mad with rage and hate when your entire race was wiped out, and it seemed as if you were the only**** one left…**


	2. Dukkha dukkha: Grief

**Note: Dukkha****-dukkha (pain of pain) are obvious sufferings, i.e. death, old age.**

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_Her best friend, Yangchen, named for the last Avatar to be born into the Air Nomads. They shared the same birthday, and considered themselves bond sisters. She had been lying near the eating hall, killed by a fire strike that had all but blasted her in two. On her pretty face, a look of pain and fear fixed at the moment of her death. 

A woman she knew by sight but had never spoken to, with her little girl still in her arms, skewered together against one wall by two arrows and red with their own blood. The girl's arms were about her mother's neck and her eyes were closed tightly as if she thought to make this nightmare go away. One of the woman's shoes had fallen from her feet, the other one dangled still on her limp toes.

Sister Iio in front of the nursery, the many bodies of the soldiers around her showing that she had gone down fighting. Her face and body were burned black by the heat that finally defeated her; Malu had only known her by what remained of her scorched robes.

The nursery. Oh, spirits above and below, the nursery. Each care-taker slaughtered, each baby in their crib dispatched with a sword thrust. Some of them had been awake when the end came and their eyes and mouths were open, perhaps expecting to be fed or played with; some had been asleep and now slept forever, their sweet faces peaceful, their cold little fingers curled. There was too much blood.

Her friends, her sisters, she had found them one by one as she walked through each of the three buildings of the temple, their bodies stabbed or burned. The Fire Nation soldiers had left them to rot where they had fallen. She did her best to cover each of their faces. She had tried hard to think that they were no longer in there, any of them, that the corpses were husks and their spirits were free. At times she had to stop and breathe deeply before she could go on.

Her father. He had left two weeks before the attack for the Southern Air Temple; he never came back for her. In her heart she knew he was dead, but still for many months she continued to watch the skyline as if he would soar down on Gapi and catch her up in his arms and tell her that it would be all right now, he was here, she didn't have to be alone anymore.

Her mother. She never came back for her either, after kissing her and telling her to be a good girl and stay in the cave, do you see? Wait until I come back for you. She had waited and she had waited, and then she had taken her glider and come back to find out what had happened. She had not found a body, but near Nami's huge singed carcass the balcony was broken, and there was a piece of cloth caught on the wrecked wood that could have come from her mother's sash. It was a long way down to the very bottom of the valley below. That was the only time that she had cried, as she let the cloth fall into the abyss.

Her people. In the first few days she sat in the ruins of the temple and looked towards the sky, and then she moved to a nearby hill when the bodies began to smell in the hot sun, and she meditated and she waited for nomads from the other Air Temples to come and find her and find what had happened to her home and her family and her friends. But as she knew with her father, so she came to know at last that no one would come for her, that whatever had happened here had happened at the other Air Temples, perhaps all of them. There was no one left to come. She was alone, all alone.

The Avatar. As the years passed, she learned that it was because of one that so many had died, killed not because they had done anything wrong but simply to suit the will of the Fire Lord. So that the Avatar would die, so had all their kind, leaving only her. So much death, just so that the Fire Nation could have their way. The disruption of the world, the demise of the one who had been born to bring balance to it.

Grief. The greatest of her pains.

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